Web 2.0: Trust and critical mass

I finally properly understood the concept behind the term Web 2.0 beyond buzzwords, hyped up statements and the wikipedia explanation starting with "Web 2.0 means different things to different people." Via Weiterbildungsblog I found a very comprehensive presentation on Web 2.0 by George Siemens (published on the connectivism blog in an impressive webcast format), giving an overview on basic technology points and application (blogging, tagging, syndication, etc.) as well as the key concepts one needs to understand.

The two issues I got out of the webcast were around trust and personalisation. A risk for trust is that parts of the knowledge created through collaborative effort simply don't have the quality they would need. A term in relation to this, based on research by Downes and Surowiecki (sorry, I could not find the paper on ProQuest or Google Scholar) is the notion of "Aggregated perspective", explained by George Siemens as "we take our own perspective and our own concept and we throw it in the public pool of other perspectives and understandings and it is the aggregation of all these various opinions that actually results in an accurate image and picture of what is occurring"

If insufficient people provide their concepts or perspectives, the benefit of this exercise is limited. On the Wikipedia page on Web 2.0 a sentence on the top says: "This article may be confusing for some readers, and should be edited to enhance clarity. Please improve the article, or discuss the issue on the talk page." This is a result of insufficient people contributing their concepts and perspectives to this specific Wikipedia Web 2.0 page. In a situation like this (or also with any wikipedia entry where there is too much or too controversial information) the reader needs pattern recognition abilities to be able to pick either the relevant information or the most objective parts of it.

What does this mean for law firms? My interpretation is that everyone in legal KM needs to try harder to get lawyers to contribute themselves, not only somehow getting their documents in a know how system. Participation is key and can help in achieving critical mass, ultimately fostering trust. It should not be too hard to show the benefits of combined effort in knowledge creation and dissemination through direct constant feedback loops, but the critical mass among lawyers cannot be replaced by others doing it for them or technology doing the job...